Dukhiram Rui and Chhidam Rui were brothers. Both worked as hired
hands to earn their bare living. On that morning, as they were preparing to
leave for work, carrying their sickles, their wives were quarreling and shouting at each other. The entire neighborhood had gotten used to it, as if it were
part of the variety of usual noises and sounds that filled their natural environment. Whenever those two voices were heard rising and shrill, the neighbors’
response was no more than resigned mutterings of “there they go again!” It
was something expected and habitual, not at all exceptional. Nobody was
particularly curious any longer about the causes of the vocal fights between
the two sisters-in-law, any more than about the cause of sunrise in the east.
On that day, none could have imagined that an occurrence of such expected
regularity was to end in a strangely twisted tragedy.

The quarreling, of course, affected their husbands somewhat more than
their neighbors. But the two brothers managed not to let it become more
than a minor nuisance. In any case they had come to accept as inescapable
their relentlessly hard life, which was like an uncontrollably rough ride in an
old one-horse buggy, its wheels with broken springs rattling endlessly, driven
on and on by some incomprehensible ruthless force. The frequent racket at
home actually bothered them much less than its rare absence. Then, heavy
with the abnormal silence, their home would seem to be crouching fearfully
under some imminent blow, some unknown catastrophe about to befall
them. That kind of uneasy silence was much more oppressive to them because of the total unpredictability of the outcome.

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